Time or Space?

The criticism for today focuses heavily on temporality—interruption, boredom, skimming, abridging, and the unstable status of “immediacy” that the epistolary form may or may not provide. But what about space? I keep thinking of Pamela as captive, constantly circulating from enclosed chamber to enclosed chamber, demarcating imprisoning spaces like the garden wall she feebly attempts to scale, or the carriages in which she is repeatedly confined as she is transferred from place to place. She locks herself in rooms; she sleeps in small outbuildings under piles of wood; she slips through small prison-like bars and windows; she is watched by the voyeuristic Mr. B from cabinets and closets; she is pinned to the mattress by Jewkes; and mostly, she is confined to the page--her own page, the page of her letter, which she attempts to widen through the endless deferral and spatial expansion that more and more writing produces. Barchas points out that the original text’s graphics denote time and heighten the epistolary form’s often uncomfortable engagement with temporality. But I also see those graphics marking space, drawing the reader to the claustrophobic similarities between the limitations of the page and to the physical spaces inhabited by the characters. Even the mode of temporality Genette calls the “immediate post-event future” creates an invisible, intermediary space; perhaps this space is the most radical for its inaccessibility and undefinability, a place of freedom from constraint. Still the letter, and the epistolary genre, are necessarily enclosed spaces that disturbingly call attention to time’s suspension rather than its progression.